British Underground Band May Be Burrowing Its Way To America

July 13, 1986|By Mary-Frances Emmons

I knew it would happen sooner or later: an English jangly band. With their guitar-oriented instrumentation, undertone vocals and minor-key harmonies, Britain's Woodentops could easily qualify as part of the new American underground, with just a hint of the gloom-rock influence.

Although the Smiths' Morrissey, in a fit of jealousy no doubt, has been heard to identify them as the Suddenflops, the Woodentops have taken the British underground scene by storm. With the new video ''It Will Come,'' from the album Well Well Well . . . , the band could be a big happening on this side of the water as well.

More accurately, the Woodentops' music could be a big happening -- the video is a bit of a puzzle. It's video vogue these days to make videos that no one outside the band can make heads or tails of.

Using collages, found art and double, triple and quadruple exposures -- combined with a bit of live footage -- the Woodentops have created a video that fires images at the viewer at machine-gun pace. It's not all that much fun to watch videos on the VCR one frame at a time, but that's about the only way to absorb what's really going on in ''It Will Come.''

Of course, you could say, ''Yeah, idiot, that's the point. They want you to be forced to listen and feel.'' Maybe so, maybe so. Whatever the answer, the Woodentops have managed to infuse ''It Will Come'' with enough energy and frenetic drive to force this piece right into your heart and soul, if not necessarily your head.

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The Church has a new release, one with a catchy song but a video that's just plain boring. The song ''Columbus,'' from the album Heyday, promises great things, but all the video delivers is footage of the band riding through LA on a flatbed truck -- edited together with some home-movie type clips.

It isn't so much that the Church members weren't trying hard enough here as that they just failed to convey what they wanted to convey.

Much of ''Columbus'' was obviously shot with a hand-held camera, a lot of it along smoggy California freeways. Anyone who's ever had a camera knows that the urge to shoot pictures out the car window is almost irresistible -- but you also learn that it never really captures what you've experienced.

Fortunately for this video, every member of the Church is astonishingly photogenic, so it isn't actually all that trying to watch.

The band should get at least half credit for this piece because the song is very good. The Church is often compared to the Beatles for its three-way- harmonies and lovely flowing melodies, but that doesn't do justice to the band's near-majestic big-guitar sound.

''Columbus'' may not be a video that you'll watch again and again, but you won't need to. The song sticks in your head after just one listen.

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Everybody from Talking Heads to Grace Jones and Peter Gabriel has lately started making videos using stop-action filming techniques.

Often a very impersonal style, the stop-action technique allows the artist to transform a sequence of unrelated objects or actions into a seemingly cohesive, if sometimes bizarre and off-center, whole. With his new video ''On Your Own,'' from the album Heaven in the Sea, Pete Shelley has managed to use the technique to combine the unusual and the familiar, and has backed it up with a pretty good song, to boot.

Directed by Pete Bishop with animation and graphics provided by London's Film Garage, ''On Your Own'' opens with a little graphic sequence not unlike MTV's famous station-identification spots.

Shelley appears, in unaltered human form, fronting a guitar band and playing one himself. The style here borrows from Echo and the Bunnymen pieces: Shelley is so close to the camera that only about half of his face ever shows. The rest of the band is scattered behind him and the stop-action effect is used on them rather than on Shelley. The guitars they hold go through a metamorphosis from instruments to a variety of objects and back again. Household items such as a refrigerator and a tea kettle, when personified in Shelley's video, become ominous living creatures.

Shelley's video differs from others using the same techniques mostly in the speed with which the images pass across the screen. Often in stop-action filming, things happen too fast to be fully assimilated. By breaking it up with realistic shots of the band and even a bit of traditional animation, Shelley and Bishop have put together a video that's accessible and entertaining.